ORIGINAL: xhoel
Tele can give you more tips on the bombing of ports. I personally would advise you against it.
Unfortunately the experience I have is before the latest patches which enhanced flak so much and also made night bombing effectively worthless. This might be reversed partially in v1.12 or after. And I feel that with more research it could still be a viable strategy. Also an appraisal of the benefits might still make this worthwhile anyway - for example if cutting off Leningrad by the ports would make the difference to capturing the city, which would make the difference to winning the war, then any cost in lost bombers no matter how high would make it worthwhile?
However some tips if useful are
i) Choose lower level ports if possible as they need less damage to stop working, and the same number of bombers in a mission create higher damage levels each time.
ii) Avoid ports with flak (e.g cities), and use recon to find flight paths that minimise flak
iii) Use fighters sweeps (or as Axis even recon spam) to degrade the performance of fighters and flak in the area, or even leave the area without fighter cover at all. Consider attacks on the enemy air or using up their air force in escorting ground suppport before attacking their ports. Do this first and then afterwards when you bomb the ports fewer of your bombers will be disrupted from delivering their payload.
iv) Manually optimise the bomber force for each attack - you can chose a maximum of 14 bomber groups which should be the ones with the most ready aircraft, with the largest payloads, the least fatigue and most morale/experience. You should be able to get about 300 bombers to actually conduct the mission with this approach as Axis. A good air leader can even mean regularly more than 300.
